Peggy Noonan has a disturbing piece in today’s Opinion Journal. It’s particularly disturbing that it’s coming from her.

She is asking the question seriously: was the FBI failure in 911 merely incompetence? Or something worse?

While few hold the FBI in lower esteem than I do, I have trouble believing that this was a deliberate effort to prevent the lower-level agents from thwarting the attack. Not because I believe the FBI incapable of such coverups and deliberate inaction–we saw plenty of it during the Clinton years, after Judge Sessions was fired and replaced by the more pliant Louis Freeh–but that they would do so for a foreign power (as opposed to a corrupt White House) is a new and frightening possibility.

The FBI was unable, or unwilling, to connect the dots that would have shown the pattern that resulted in the deadly attack of last fall. But now Peggy connects some dots herself, within the agency, and the picture isn’t very pretty.

Any real probe will take this as an opportunity to air all of the agency’s dirty laundry, going back to the Clinton years, and all the evidence tampering and obstruction that went on during that time. Because the dots from such an investigation may show the much bigger picture of government malfeasance that the kneepad press largely ignored, out its adoration for the man it put in the White House in 1992.